1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a body viewing pouch. More specifically, this invention relates to a pouch having a viewing window and being fully flexible to receive a dead body at the hospital in the place of the normal body bag, to be used to transport the body to the funeral home for preparation and embalming, to display the body inside the open casket at the funeral service, to contain the body for delivery to the crematory and to be consumed in the cremation process. During the entire process, from hospital to cremation, the body need not be removed from the pouch.
2. Description of the Related Art
The prior art includes body bags which have been flexible and closeable by stitches, for instance, or zippers, and some of these have had windows for viewing of the face for identification of the body. An example is shown in the old U.S. Pat. No. 3,33,142 to James D. Marston, et al., which issued Dec. 29, 1885. This disclosure includes a wire structure inside the bag adapted to hold the window off the face of the deceased. There have also been provided burial cases of metal sometimes adapted to be vacuumized to help preserve the dead body within. Some of these cases have had windows An example of such a device is shown in the U.S. Pat. No. 1,431,727, which issued Oct. 10, 1922 to George W. Dunn. (Copies of these patents are enclosed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.97.)
The present invention serves the purpose of the body bag and burial case, and at the same time is crematable. By way of background, the public's urgent concern with respect to certain communicable diseases now growing by epidemic proportion has demanded strict and careful segregation of any body having died from such a disease from contact with the public. Indeed, even the personnel in some funeral homes have refrained from servicing dead bodies having died from such a disease.
In the past, when a human has died in a hospital or at an accident scene, he has been transported in a zippered funeral body bag to the funeral home where he has been taken out of the body bag, embalmed, made up and laid out in a fabric-lined casket for viewing by the public. After the funeral service the body has been removed from the casket, unless it is intended to cremate the casket with the body, and has been placed in a cremation container and transferred to the crematory. The multiple handling by employees of the hospital and ambulance corps, the funeral home employees and the crematory personnel is clearly unsuitable for the body of a person who has died from a highly contagious disease. It is also highly undesirable that the body itself be exposed to public viewing without some kind of intermediate guard to prevent real or imagined transfer of communicable elements.